Over Labor Day weekend, Jonathan Marquis took a quick, last-minute trip to Glacier National Park’s northwest corner, up to the area around Kintla Lake, where he hiked more than 25 miles round-trip for the sake of a view into a basin that’s not frequented, all to see Harris Glacier.

After the long journey in, he took pictures just like any climber would. And he started a drawing of Harris, just like the ones he’s made for the other 58 named glaciers in the state of Montana. The rendering in colored pencil will join his newly complete archive in an exhibition, “Something to Hold,” that opens on Friday at the Missoula Art Museum.

The marathon hike marked the finale of an 11-year endeavor called the Glacier Drawing Project.

Every summer since 2014, the University of Montana graduate has traveled north from Tucson, Arizona, where he teaches art, to check more glaciers off the list. 

This decade-plus of work, which crosses over between mountaineering, environmentalism, documentary and art, has, in some ways, felt like it was “all getting beta,” he said.

“Figuring out where to go, how to draw things, what’s the best view, building the skills and the endurance through the physical components of actually getting out there,” he said.

The artworks themselves are realistic but not photorealist. After all, there’s photographic and scientific documentation of how glaciers are receding. The point was to explore humans’ relationship to a part of the environment that’s difficult to reach and often talked about in abstract terms.

“How we imagine a glacier really has effects for the health of the ecosystem on the ground,” he said.

He hopes that if people think of them as active parts of the environment, ones that’ve carved the mountain ranges and have value unto themselves, it might change perspectives.

“If you just imagine them as a feature on a map or something — or data — then you don't have quite the same relationship with them, because our psychology, our humanity, is tied up in the ice here in one way or another,” he said.

"Fissure from High Park 8/06/2014" (graphic and colored pencil on paper, 18 by 24 inches, 2014)

Jonathan Marquis’ exhibition, “Something to Hold,” is on view at the Missoula Art Museum through Dec. 7. The opening reception is First Friday, Sept. 6, from 5-8 p.m. Marquis will give a talk at 5:15 p.m. He’ll also give a free, all-ages drawing workshop on Saturday, Sept. 7, from 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m.

In a way, the project dates back almost 20 years when an Indiana transplant took a hike up to Turquoise Lake on the east side of the Mission Mountains and spied an icy landmark called Sunrise.

“I was so impressed that I was seeing a glacier — I'd never seen one before,” he said.

Marquis was a fresh transfer from Ball State University who'd moved out West to finish a bachelor’s degree in art at the University of Montana. While he quickly got hooked on the outdoors, it took longer to carve out a place in his art.

In 2013, he began working the mountains into his mixed-media paintings, which had previously centered on pop culture and superheroes. The next year, he launched a Kickstarter for the Glacier Drawing Project. While online fundraising platforms became somewhat notorious for big ideas that might never reach fruition, Marquis kept it up even as he studied for master’s degrees in art and art history at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He traveled on his own dime, staying with friends and paying his own way entirely until some recent grants and funding.

Besides being difficult to reach on foot, the glaciers are spread out geographically. They're primarily located in Glacier National Park and the Absaroka Beartooth Wilderness, with some scattered around the Missions, the Bob Marshall Wilderness and more.

"Beartooth from Beartooth 8/18/2019" (graphic and colored pencil on paper, 5.5 by 7.5 inches, 2020)

Brandon Reintjes, the senior curator at the MAM, said they began talking about an exhibition several years ago and took note of “a pretty singular focus as an artist,” he said.

The season to reach these glaciers is short — mostly August, when the high country has melted out. By September, he has to return to Arizona to teach. He quickly realized that if he went too early, the snow might be covering his subject. Go later, and the ice is exposed. If he had the money and time, he’d like to redo the entire project solely in August and September.

Some of the early, large drawings were made entirely on site but he soon changed tactics. For one, it takes several days to complete with the right level of detail. Working with paper on site isn’t practical either. In good weather, it might get damaged when he rolled it up to transport off the mountain. In bad conditions, it might not be possible to make art at all. When he got a good view at Miche Wabun Glacier, which sits southeast of Goat Haunt Mountain in a remote northern area of the park, it was raining.

A peak-bagging expedition isn't necessarily the best creative time, either. Some were 20 to 30 miles round-trip. By the time he got to the top, he wasn’t necessarily feeling loose and creative. He began relying more on photographs, again taken himself.

He also improved as a mountaineer over the course of the project, which led to dramatic compositions and the challenges of plotting the right vantage.

“I’m mainly looking for a vista where I can see the whole form of the glacier,” such as a high point or a ridge. If you approach them at ground level, you might “lose a lot of the character of the piece.”

Initially, he felt like he had to reach each one directly, with the romantic idea of getting close enough to touch them.

“Then you realize how hard some of these are actually to get to,” he said.

Jonathan Marquis observes his collection of drawings on display at the Montana Art Museum on Wednesday, Aug. 28 in Missoula. For the past 11 years, Marquis has visited and sketched all 59 named glaciers in Montana. His exhibition, titled “Something to Hold,” brings together this extensive body of work.

He had to decide what counted as “visiting” a glacier, too. There were times he could see a glacier that might be sitting high up, but it was so distant that it didn’t feel like it counted.

The Livingston Range in the northwestern corner of the park was one of the most difficult to navigate due to the lack of trails. That last one on his list, Harris Glacier, rests south of the east end of Kintla Lake below Parke Peak. He got shut down once already this year.

“It’s just tucked up in this basin that there’s no business going to, just surrounded by thick brush and steep slopes. No trails to it, no direct, real easy peaks to get to where you can get a view of it, so the couple routes I tried didn’t really pan out," he said.

What counts as a glacier is another question he had to wrestle with. While there are exceptions, a glacier must still cover 25 acres to count. Harris has shrunk, but he felt it warranted inclusion.

Reintjes thought it was an interesting thing to have to grapple with. 

"He was asking himself questions about this all the time and trying to come up with an official and unofficial tally," he said. "Any close look at the natural world would cause you to question your underlying assumptions."

He said there were times when he slowed down, like when he was in graduate school and working on mixed-media paintings and sculpture (again, related to glaciers).

“I don't think there's been a summer since I've started where I've not visited and drawn a glacier, at least one or two,” he said. He recalls one year where he only made one “good” glacier trip, yet he reached marquee ones like Pumpelly and Logan, in the same visit.

To Reintjes, a drawing can’t really re-create for a viewer the experience of bushwhacking for miles on end, but Marquis’ images do bottle some of the "otherworldliness" of high alpine areas.

“You have a shift of perspective, of personal perspective that allows you to pay attention to things in a different way — the atmosphere, the hard work it takes to get there, or moving into a different ecosystem. He captures that his attention has shifted in depicting and documenting these places,” he said.

"Ipasha 8/13/2023" (colored pencil on paper, 8 by 11 inches, 2024)

His style of drawing has naturally evolved over time. Reintjes pointed out that with a project that’s lasted this long, everything has changed: the glaciers, the drawings of the glaciers, the person making the drawings.

When he starts sketching, Marquis said he’ll usually follow “the lead of the glacier and the drawing, so that changes” from piece to piece. Some are more abstract and expressive, others are more detailed.

Early on, he was focused on the form itself, with harder lines of graphite emphasizing the crags and crevasses. There’s also the matter of figuring out how to draw them — since a mass of white ice burrowed into a mountainside isn’t usually the subject, the mountain is.

He transitioned to colored pencils and gradually heightened the palette, although if you’re not familiar with the east side of Glacier, the tints and shades of red and green rock might seem more exaggerated than it really is. He thought color might be able to “express a little bit more what it’s like to be out there,” and add an emotional or sensory character.

Reintjes said the MAM staff was struck by the “ethereal quality” of the drawings and found them unusual and compelling.

While the project’s technically done, Marquis didn’t sound like someone who’s done with any of the parts of it — the drawing, the hiking, the climbing, the mountains.

There’s a short documentary to complete, and a small catalog. While he’s been mostly self-funded, in the later years, he’s had some financial help, such as a Matthew Hansen Wilderness Inspiration Fellowship last year through the UM Wilderness Institute. The MAM provided assistance for this show, which includes over 60 drawings. He’d like to exhibit them in other museums, too. He needs to finish some of the duplicate drawings so they don’t live on in a half-completed state.

He still intends on drawing glaciers and hiking to them but without a long-term deadline.

“I’d still like to be able to continue to go draw them and revisit glaciers to see how they change, continue to create the archive that I have, because it’s not only a drawing archive, it’s a photo archive.”

In the past, the glacier trips have fed into mixed-media paintings, cyanotypes and sculptures that draw on ideas of glaciation. He doesn’t feel that it was a one-way street either, as the process let it “do this work on me, too, and see how I change and how the artwork changes, how I evolve as a human doing the project.”

"Red Eagle, 8/12/2021" (colored pencil on paper, 6 by 10 inches, 2022)